Trauma, Haunting, and the Limits of Narration in Gabi Köpp’sWarum war ich bloß ein Mädchen, Leonie Biallas’s“Komm, Frau, raboti”: Ich war Kriegsbeute, and Renate Meinhof’sDas Tagebuch der Maria Meinhof

Abstract

In this article the author examines three examples of German women’s life-writing that thematize mass rapes by the Red Army at the end of the Second World War from the perspective of adolescent girls, regarding their representation of the rapes and the way they frame the trauma experienced by the survivors along with short- and long-term consequences. The author argues that despite the effects of what Suzette Henke calls “scriptotherapy” the narratives may have had for their writers, two levels of haunting intersect and ultimately remain unreconciled in these texts : (1) the haunting of the sexual violence that affected the women personally; and (2) the haunting of the Nazi past. While the former is the main focus of the narratives in that they attempt to formulate what Urvashi Butalia calls a “vocabulary of rupture” around traumatic memory, the latter manifests in a contradictory representation of the Soviets as well as in narrative lacunae or erasure of Nazi Germany’s responsibility for the war. The author concludes with a reflection on contemporary sexual politics and the transgenerational impact of the haunting in children born of rape.